Films
Honey Bunch
The first part of a Halloween Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie double bill, Honey Bunch is one of those tense horror-thrillers that does a lot with a little. A cast of barely more than 6 people. A single location (creepy old house, now eccentric rehabilitation centre, natch). Bonus points for actors playing more than one role.
The experimental-cure that’s a-bit-more-creepy-than-you-first-expect is well trodden ground, and I don’t think I’d claim Honey Bunch does anything terribly unexpected: we’ve seen most of these characters and locations before, but it does its thing with conviction and is a fun watch. Always at risk of veering into being a little campy horror (the dour nurse, the intense husband - there are touches of League of Gentlemen) but they manage to keep it surprisingly straight-faced, even as the plot gets weirder.
Bechdel pass too!
La Grazia
My first film of LIFF2025 is an interesting one. I don’t know director Paolo Sorrentino particularly well but this is a slow paced study of an unusual life. We join the president of Italy, still mourning the death of his wife, and muddling through the last days of his administration. He’s much respected. He’s made it to where he is by being slow, methodical and precise. Or, less favourably, by avoiding taking any difficult decisions. He’s earned his nickname of “reinforced concrete”.
What follows is a character study of the president. We see him bickering with old friends and his daughter, chatting with the pope, nodding away furtively to hip-hop (despite protesting how much he detests modern music) and furtively smoking endless cigarettes on the roof.
It’s thought provoking and very human. Much of the time, I think I’d find it too slow and open-ended but settled into the cinema for the start of the festival, it felt like a good way to start.
LIFF2025
It’s that time again! Armed with 30+ tickets (ok, we’ve scaled back a bit in recent years) and a pencil-marked festival programme, I’m about to take a week off work to do very little except sit in a dark room and watch films. I can’t wait.
I’ve already forgotten what I’ve got picked out but that shouldn’t matter. There’s a big and varied list of stuff - from horror to animation to classic to downright weird. Let’s go!
Chain Reaction
Morgan Freeman has been in a lot of films. Many good, many bad. It feels almost silly to use a Morgan Freeman film tag link to take us to a forgotten mid 90s action movie but when you see he’s co-starring with Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz… what more could you ask for?
I think it’s fair to say this is not any of them’s greatest cinematic piece but neither is it their worst. This is a competent, pacy thriller with some twists and turns. Weisz is a nery scientist (of course), Keanu is a baffled looking techy (of course) and Morgan Freeman is a wise and knowing gentleman (of course). Some kind of infinite energy source has been discovered. Cue goons, explosions, set-ups and chase sequences.
It’s decent. The worst you can really say about it is it hails from a action movie era when female characters were universally pathetic. Weisz is massively underused here and basically swings between looking scared or relieved for most of the film.
The Lego Movie
Is this a good film? Surely not really. It’s definitely fun. And I think it’s probably better than it really has any right to be. Cash in crossovers from toys and games are pretty much universally awful. But this isn’t. Somehow, they managed to keep it just silly enough that it feels joyful and yet not so silly that it feels like a waste of your time. It’s a perfect plane movie.
And it has a cast of thousands of big name actors, which makes it a surprisingly useful film tag pick.